On the flight back from Ahmedabad to Hyderabad, in 2007, the environmental scientist Narayana Peesapaty looked at the food served to him in plastic crockery and wondered the plastic waste it generates every day all over the world. The thinking time that flights offer, he started brainstorming on the alternatives for plastic utensils. This idea transported him back to one of the hot afternoons on the farm where his team had used sorghum (jowar) roti as a spatula to eat daal. The jowar roti was so hard that they kept it dipped in the thick curry but it didn’t become soft as they finished their lunch. That day Narayana Peesapaty landed in Hyderabad with his big entrepreneurial idea – using flour to create disposable utensils. By the end of 2007, he left his job as a Senior Scientific Officer with International Crop Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad to focus full time on creating eco friendly utensils. Cutlery being the simpler, smaller of the utensils, he started focusing on developing that. He worked for three years from his home kitchen to develop the right recipe for cutlery. He could make spoons, sporks and chopsticks from a mixture of different kinds of flour. He used a certain proportion of millet, jowar (sorghum), rice and wheat which he kneaded with water. The higher proportion of jowar flour is deliberate. Peesapaty shares,“During my research, I learnt that one of the main reason for groundwater depletion is the reduction in cultivation of dryland crops like jowar. One of the ways I want to help is by creating its demand through my products and increasing its consumption.” He added some spices too, cumin and rock salt so they can be consumed after use. If not consumed, they can be discarded by throwing in mud or in potted plans to decompose, which usually takes between three to seven days. This edible cutlery has absolutely no vegetable and animal fat or any form of preservatives or emulsifiers. It is then baked at over 200 degrees to reduce the water content to 1.75 per cent. This gives the spoons and sporks the shelf life of three years, says Peesapaty. With the prototype ready, in 2010, he took a loan from the bank of Rs 4.5 crore to purchase the machinery to manufacture it at a commercial scale. Currently, he uses the technology used in biscuit factories but, Peesapaty says, he is working to develop a fully customised integrated system to develop his edible cutlery. They started selling the product in November last year from their website, organic stores and organic bazaars. In less than a year, Peesapaty claims, they have reached monthly sales of Rs 2 lakh and most of the demand is from households . But, his plan is to get caterers for parties and marriages onboard since it is at large-scale gathering the consumption of plastic utensils is huge. He is now working to develop a knife but hasn’t been able to crack its recipe yet. “Plates, bowls will also be introduced but it will take a while before I develop the workable, practical model,” says Peesapaty. So, before we gorge on the plates, we will be content with eating the spoons and sporks that he sells at Rs 4 per piece. The company is looking to raise funding to start manufacturing units across the globe.
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Sumit Sharma Venture capital sector in India is awash with capital yet there are issues that need to be sorted out first, Jayant Sinha, minister of state for finance said in Mumbai on Tuesday (18 August). "About 90-95 per cent of the capital comes from outside India,’’ said Sinha after finance minister Arun Jaitley inaugurated two new funds by SIDBI. ``All that money is welcome. At the same time we need a domestic VC industry in India that is funding our innovators and entrepreneurs.’’ India needs several successive waves of innovation and entrepreneurship that will lift productivity of the economy which will result in new products and services, and make India an exporting powerhouse. We have to put in place the infrastructure for entrepreneurship and innovation now if we have to provide sustainability and fuel for economic growth over the next five or ten or 15 years, he said. As in the case of China, India too needs to have a balanced domestic VC industry, said Sinha. If we have a VC industry based here in India then we will overcome the problem we are facing in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship. Today most of the money coming from outside is going to a few select areas like e-commerce. If we solve India’s problems related to solar technology, affordable irrigation, electric scooters, medical devices, healthcare delivery then those products and services will be exported out of India to the rest of the world whether it is Indonesia, Nigeria, Vietnam, Bolivia or other countries.
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After successfully concluding the first batch of Accelerate|Entrepreneur, BW Accelerate powered by BW Businessworld, is inviting applications for the second batch for Delhi NCR based startups. The three-month business acceleration programme is slated to commence in September 2015. With a vision to create a comprehensive offering for early stage start-ups, BW Accelerate is an ecosystem initiative built on knowledge and intelligence acquired over the years. Its foundation is entrenched in fostering innovation, speeding business growth and accelerating entrepreneurial aspiration in the country.It offers an exceptionally well-planned programme with experienced hand holding, business intelligence and market access. The visibility, reach and intensity of the program drive startups to graduate with a world-class offering. "It has been an incredible first batch with phenomenal mentor engagement, connections with large enterprises and business leaders. We picked some of the toughest businesses across sectors. Over 70 per cent of these have either already raised funds or are in advanced conversations of doing so," said Ashu Agrawal, Director, BW Accelerate. Inviting applications for the new batch, he stated, "We continue to look for unique distribution focused platform play and products, and startups that are working to systematize, unorganized consumption." The key attributes that we will focus on are platforms and/or businesses that can create strong engagement applications with high frequency of consumption. The deadline for submitting applications is August 31, 2015. The program is open to startups and the online application can be done use the link www.f6s.com/bwaccelerate.The first list of shortlisted applicants will be announced after a face-to-face session with an expert panel in the first week of September. The final list of startups, which will make it to the second batch of BW Accelerate, will begin the three-month acceleration process from the third week of September 2015. This will culminate into a Demo Day in December when the startups will showcase their ideas to key industry influential, top angel investors and VCs.
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Start-ups - and the new age companies that have germinated from these - are faring much better on the gender equality front than the more traditional industries, writes, T.N. HariGender equality is often a subject of heated discussion, and the reasons are pretty obvious. Even those that would agree on the need for gender equality do not necessarily support it whole-heartedly when the rubber hits the road - the 18 year-journey of the Women's Reservation bill in Parliament is testimony to the lip service accorded to gender equality, and till date, the Lok Sabha has not voted on the Bill.Traditionally, some industries were male dominated, and many of them continue to be male dominated - especially those that depended upon physical prowess. Within these industries, women have often played limited roles.However the new age industries and start-ups are beginning to change the paradigm. Three things are different about start-ups: T.N. Hari1. They depend on 'knowledge' and 'innovation' much more than the traditional industries. Traditional industries too need smart people, but these smart people then used industrial engineering techniques to come up with idiot-proof processes that could be operated by those without much of an education. The nature of work was such that this kind of 'industrialization' was possible. The new age industries are different in terms of the nature of work and the competitive landscape in which they operate - they need innovation and problem solving capability at every level. When survival depends on continuous innovation, companies can't discriminate and thrive. Can you imagine Amazon or Uber not capitalizing on an idea just because it has come from a woman, when the source of their leading edge is innovative ideas? Companies in declining or mature markets can afford to be more cavalier. Also, the average education level is significantly higher. With education comes some enlightenment (not always though!) and slightly more liberal views as well - which eventually translates to accepting the truth that women are really equal.2. The workforce is much younger. This younger workforce has experienced gender equality. Those that experience something always tend to truly understand it while those that haven't just pay lip service. The percentage of women in engineering and business schools has been going up steadily over the last few decades. The young men that comprise this workforce have no doubts that their women counterparts are equal, if not better, in any which way. They have been beaten by their women/girl counterparts at every stage in life - every exam day, every placement season! Start-ups that have become full blown mature firms like say CRISIL & Cognizant or companies that have yet to make the transition from a start-up to a mature firm like BigBasket or Spoonjoy generally employ a whole new generation that has experienced gender equality early in life. And they tend to carry this early experience into their work life.3. They operate in a level playing field where women suffer no disadvantages. In several traditional institutions (manufacturing, army) the playing field is tilted heavily in favor of the men Women perform as well as men in roles that do not test physical prowess. Often they do better by demonstrating a higher emotional quotient and a better understanding of people and business. One would struggle to name a bank of significance that does not have a woman at the helm! SBI, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, HSBC Bank - one can go on. And, more importantly, women have a fair representation at all levels in these institutions.Having spent equal time in the start-up world and in the traditional industry, I can say with some confidence that the start-ups - and the new age companies that have germinated from these - are faring much better on the gender equality front than the more traditional industries. However, I am not for a moment saying that all start-ups or all new age industries have cracked the code. There has been, and continues to be, a lot of criticism that tech start-ups continue to be male dominated - including companies like Google. A lot of entrepreneurs and VC partners still are largely male. This interesting quote from the Wall street Journal is a good reality check: "Today, there are many examples of successful women founders and executives of tech companies. Despite the success of these trailblazers, many investors still suffer the unintended consequences of pattern recognition when it comes to deciding which businesses and teams to back: Founder(s) must be computer-science majors or, better yet, dropouts…oh, and they are male".The author is HR head at BigBasket.com
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Competition Commission should look into e-comm cos' Gross Merchandise Valuation & discounting mechanism, says Mohandas PaiMohandas Pai, the hotshot ex-CFO of Infosys, minces no words. After taking over as Chairman of the Board at Manipal Global Education Services he dedicates most of his time to startups. A commenter on current affairs, he also has become a self-confessed constitutional liberal fundamentalist. He believes that the Articles 29 and 30, which protects the interests of the minority, have been used up by the political class to divide the country’s majority. Talking to BW|Businessworld's Vishal Krishna, he says that the political class should instead focus on providing 300 million jobs and adds that if India does not wake up to skilling individuals or providing them jobs, then “we are sitting on a gunpowder keg, which can explode at any time and destroy the social structure of this country.” Somewhere in the depths of his outspoken demeanour he has also been, like other Infoscians, vociferous about setting up an ecosystem for startups to list in India and also raise money with reduced tax structures. Indian companies today are constrained by regulation and are “behind the curve”, since the wealthy, in India, are scared to invest because of tax implications, when it comes to competing with global capital. He has also set up a Rs 600 crore startup fund, along with Ranjan Pai, the chairman of the Manipal Group, and has invested in a dozen odd startups. Here are the excerpts of the interview: What do you think of the current rush of e-commerce companies to show revenues that hardly make any sense, especially the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) that they speak about?GMV is a fraud. It cannot be recognised as income or sale by any accounting body. They may say that to the media. But it is not what they would be reporting in their accounts. But e-commerce is here to stay and there is a rush to win as many customers as possible. They have to fix the supply chain. However, their discounting mechanisms should be looked at by the Competition Commission. GMV itself needs to be re-examined. The strategy is clear; the dominant player is going to win. What bothers me is that today they have a reasonable share of the market with discounts. If that stops, they would have to focus on profitability and customer retention. But my contention is, at that point of time, what if a large fund backs another startup that offers discounts; the customers will go there. It is a dangerous game. Today it seems in e-commerce there is a sucker born every minute, from the funding side as well as the entrepreneur sideIn E-comm There Is A Sucker Born Every Minute, From Both Funding & Entrepreneur Side: Mohandas Pai. If there is a bubble there will be a lot of money lost, which is ok. There is also a higher propensity for jobs to go away. There will always be bubbles, we need disruptive capital. Not something that funds discounts and tries to exit quickly. Do you think the government should support startups the way it supported the IT industry?Yes that is how the IT industry grew and became a $160 billion industry. In 1998 the NDA government helped formulate policies that helped the software industry with tax swaps. I predict that startups will offer 3.5 million jobs in a decade and will add a cumulative value of $500 billion. These startups will be Indian centric and will solve India problems. These startups can also support work in the USA. I see retail, healthcare, education, cyber security, financial inclusion and skill development as major opportunities. Most of the employees will be provided by sweat equity, and a reasonable salary, and in time they will become global companies. Startups will bring innovation ad disruption. Of course 60 percent of the companies will fail. The remaining will be highly successful. Mobiles will be the highest penetrated in this country, compared to any region in the world, and services will be offered on mobiles. In many of the services the winner take all model will still hold. Mobile wallet is already a big business; technology is changing the way we consume things. In this investment rush do you see any aberrations?A lot of foreign funds are creating oligopolistic tendencies. The IT industry is the only one that built the Indian middle class dream. I believe that startups can do the same if only wealthy Indians begin to back ideas. Today they are deterred by the tax structures and are also not accustomed to the technology industry’s prowess. So they are behind the curve when it comes to foreign funds and their ability to find entrepreneurs. This is where the current government is trying to make it easier for satrtups to do business and access funds. However for a long period of time the government policy is to blame for making it playing ground for foreign funds. Look at China and how they have built services for the Chinese; Alibaba, TenCent, Baidu and Xiaomi are great companies because the Chinese government has protected their domestic technology companies. India is sadly playing out like a new colony for these foreign funds. We needed to act fast and create a level playing field for Indian investors and startups. You have always been vociferous about data protection, why?The Prime Minister’s Twitter handle has data sitting in a foreign country. Indians are consuming over mobile phones and this data will be located in foreign data centres. Data sovereignty is a big issue, the USA enforces it. Why can’t India do it? The data of Indian consumers should be in India. Today they want to snoop on India. Foreign nations can do so because all our data is there. Our government is oblivious to this whole thing. We need a policy to enforce the proliferation of Indian data centres. Do you think we have overdone English as our language as a preference?Yes, there are around 300 million Indians who can speak English. Yes only a small fraction of them can use it effectively. So there is a need to build local language technologies and use local languages in smart phones to deliver services. This also gives opportunity of skilling 300 million young Indians who will require jobs. What do you think about jobs and the need to create them fast?We are sitting on a powder keg. Automation is the need of the hour and robotics is going to take over manufacturing lines. There are however opportunities in services such as retail and supply chain. These are questions that need to be taken seriously by the government. Its poverty that is making people fall prey to evangelists. The affect is that the nation’s identity and multi-faceted culture is facing threat. Articles 29 and 30 are used by the minorities to keep the majority in check and in turn deprive them of the right to use the Constitution. I am a constitutional fundamentalist, but of liberal mind. India has been an open society and has always assimilated ideas from other cultures. This can fail if the government does not look in to providing jobs. The open society may become a closed one and ideas, which are the essence of openness, will become prey to monotheistic religions. Connect this with the youth we need to offer a future. If we cannot offer them economic freedom they will obviously fall victim to other unsuitable ideologies that only promise to change lives.
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Online real estate listing platform Housing.com has picked up 100% stake in HomeBuy360, a unique cloud-based Sales Lifecycle Management Platform that connects developers, agents and buyers, for $2 million. The HomeBuy360 plaform can be used to streamline the entire sales lifecycle, by tracking inventory, managing customer relations and in effect drive efficiencies in their sale operations. This will help reduce costs for 20,000+ developers in the realty ecosystem. This acquisition will also fortify Housing.com’s Data Science Lab (DSL) with rich data on inventory and transactions in the real estate sector. Commenting on the acquisition, Rishabh Gupta, iCEO and COO Housing.com said, “Developers are key stakeholders to drive efficiency in the Indian real estate sector. Our vision is that every developer uses HB360 to bring down their sales and operating costs. This will help in reduction of property prices eventually benefitting the consumers.” Commenting on the partnership, Rajat Kothari, Founder and CEO, HomeBuy360 said, “The Indian real estate sector is witnessing tremendous growth and traction but it is still highly unorganized, posing significant challenges for the entire ecosystem. With less than 10% of developers currently using CRM for their back end & customer connect operations, we have a huge market opportunity ahead of us. Housing.com has today established itself as a disrupter with innovative products and solutions. Its strong developer network pan India will allow us to further scale our business nationally”. This is Housing.com's third acquisition this year. Earlier this year, Housing.com had acquired Indian Real Estate Forum (IREF), a platform providing unbiased property information to consumers and Realty BI to empower property buyers and financial institutions to assess risks and take informed decisions. With these acquisitions, Housing.com consolidates its leadership position as a comprehensive online realty player and a game changer striving to bring positive change in the real estate industry through its consumer centric products and solutions.
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Elsys is the first of the ten start-ups picked up by the government, to solve real life problems for India, writes Vishal Krishna Around 10 million passenger cars have been added on the roads since 2010 and none of them have an accident management system. According to the Department of Transportation, there are 1.2 million Indians who have lost their lives in the last decade due to accidents. Many of those deaths could have been avoided provided information reached emergency services on time. The government could not crack it and hence they have decided that using technology was the way forward and startups could be their saviours in stopping road accidents. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has requested startups to make software solutions and devices that can solve Indian problems. The new star-tup initiative, run by the Indian Electronics and Semiconductor Association and the Software Technology Park of India, is intended for that purpose. Elsys, a startup that provides emergency accident assist services, through its data management platform "Raksha" is all set to be the first startup to be part of the government run Electropreneur park. The device SafeDrive can be retrofitted into cars and bikes and on massive impact, the device triggers phone calls to an ambulance service in the vicinity, dials next of kin and shows exact location of the accident. On top of that, the data collects information on driving habits and can also allow video capture accident or impact. "We built the system to make sure that an ambulance reaches the victim in less than an hour," says Prasad Pillai, co-founder of the company. He adds that he had built this system after a near fatal experience. The Raksha platform collects data from vehicles across the country and presents the data to the government to continuously improve transport services and safety. Elsys is the first of the ten startups picked up by the government, to solve real world problems for India. A few months ago, Ashok Chandak, Chairman of the IESA, along with the folks from the Software Technology park of India, picked up startups to solve problems such as road safety, accident management, public services information management, access to education and healthcare with the use of smart devices. The government received 240 applications of which 160 were shortlisted and 10 selected. Sources say that each start up will receive around Rs 30 lakh to Rs 60 lakh of funding to incubate their ideas and also create market access for commercial viability. Elsys hopes to use this experience to scale up to 100,000 customers in one year. Their go to market model is B2B2C; the founders will connect with automobile companies to retrofit the product into cars or will allow consumers to buy directly off the Elsys website. They plan to sell to state governments too as their product could be used in state transport department vehicles. The platform can even collect on board diagnostic data. There is also a case for hospitals and insurance companies to work with data collected from Elsys to create a network for nationwide road safety. Currently, Elsys is self funded and the company plans to raise a seed around by the end of three months. "We hope to raise our round quickly because the interest in this emergency management product needs us to scale up manufacturing the device," says Jayanth Jagadeesh, co-founder of Elsys. His company competes with the likes of FIN, a bluetooth-based gesture based infotainment management system, which has raised $1 million from Kalaari Capital, and CarIQ, a car on board diagnostics system, which has raised $1 million from Snow Leopard Ventures. FIN is yet to see market traction while CarIQ is trying to ramp up its operations. The good thing is that these startups are solving problems that Indian citizens face when it comes to information transparency and efficiency of service. They could be great acquisition targets to the likes of a Bosch or a Continental, the automobile tier 1 vendors, if they manage to create a niche technology service. The game is in the software platform of Elsys and others. They should scale up their services for Indian consumers and businesses.
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Over the last 20 years, K Ganesh has been a maverick entrepreneur along with his wife Meena Ganesh. They have created businesses that have delivered wealth for shareholders and employees alike. Their last exit, when their venture Tutor Vista was sold to Pearson’s PLC for $220 million, made them household names. It was their fourth venture and the companies were sold at a very decent valuation too. Perhaps they have perfected the art of creating successful startups and have created exits worth $300 million. His philosophy is to create and seed ideas that can become long-term businesses rather than setting up an investment fund. His angel investments through his incubating company-- Growth Story -- in HomeLane and BigBasket have endeavoured to solve consumer problems through a combination of engaging customers through technology and delivering the final service at home. His own startup, Portea, has solved the problem of post-surgery home healthcare for patients and is currently on an expansion mode. He spoke to BW | Businessworld's Vishal Krishna about the future of startups in this country and the ideas that can currently be scaled to become big businesses. Here are the excerpts: What does Growth Story want to look at over the next five years?We have a specific view of the world. The way I see it, in five years, India stands at a huge opportunity and startups are the cente of it all. Firstly let us look at software-as-service; it is not a scalable business anymore. The technology should now look at consumer services; technology should solve problems such as handyman availability, healthcare delivery, fresh food delivery and creating home interiors. There are several such ideas which can create the next valuable businesses. These are some macro level themes too because there is no brand being built. By brand I mean a service that can offer reliability and consistency. The consumer today wants things at an instant and is worried about the quality offered. In our grocery business, BigBasket, we have our own private label which we are building as a brand. Organising the unorganised is one of my favourite themes to. Can we organise carpenters and plumbers and bring them on a Uber like business model? This is what Indian startups can do. So the first two themes; one to create a brand and then to organise services. Can these services really be organised?In our startup, Portea, we have physiotherapists that are independent consultants. These people used to do 2 treatments a day, today by giving them location based requests the number of patients per physiotherapist has gone up to 6 per day. These consultants have to be on time, manage a smile and deliver consistent service; this is our promise as a brand for the consumer. This leads me to my third theme, which is creating on demand services and this is what all our investee companies are doing. This will be a large theme going forward and many services such as banking will get disrupted. The fourth theme is more around delivering micro services through the mobile to disrupt the food industry, the housing and healthcare industry. We like the vertical play and horizontal services, like organising physiotherapists, plumbers and carpenters. There is talk about full stack businesses, what are they?A full stack business means an entrepreneur's ability to understand the entire business that he wants to serve, with technology as the core, which includes design, manufacturing, supply chain and delivery. HomeLane is a perfect example of a full stack interior designing company; the founder Srikanth Iyer is solving a real world problem of reducing the timeline of delivering interiors to home owners. The business manufacturers and builds to order, its engagement model with the customer is unique. What about technology businesses that offer B2B services?Data services will be big if you have to understand consumers. But Growth Story has not yet looked at this space. In the long run as our businesses scale data crunching will become a crucial part of the service. Data allows companies to deliver on campaigns and win more customers. Data and location based services should make sure that the cost of delivery should not go up. This is what we call actionable insights. Similarly I think the internet-of-things will become an important business. Its early days and the technology is still being built to offer connected services. Let me be honest with you in the next ten years there will be technology being built for Indians who need access to good healthcare and financial services. This is 85 percent of India. You and I are living in a gated world. But the services are needed for people who will use the internet for the first time and they will be income groups that will spend a portion of their earnings if technology reaches them. These are people who will consume information for the first time through the smart phone. Local services will become big businesses. Amidst all this, execution is the key and entrepreneurs need to solve this piece first. Ideas are a plenty.
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